I got a shoot coming up where I'm only going to make medium shots of kids in a chromakey studio and some closeups of some fruits on a plate.

I'll be shooting HDCAM on the Sony HDW-750W, now the director came up to me and said he wanted to use a pro35 adapter and digi-primes.
Now i have never used either the adapter or the lenses but I was wondering how much would i gain by using a pro35 for just headshots??

And correct me if i'm wrong but the the Digi-Primes are a lot better then standard ENG style HD zooms right???

I got a shoot coming up where I'm only going to make medium shots of kids in a chromakey studio and some closeups of some fruits on a plate.

I'll be shooting HDCAM on the Sony HDW-750W, now the director came up to me and said he wanted to use a pro35 adapter and digi-primes.Now i have never used either the adapter or the lenses but I was wondering how much would i gain by using a pro35 for just headshots??

And correct me if i'm wrong but the the Digi-Primes are a lot better then standard ENG style HD zooms right???

Thnx,

you don't need an adaptor for digi-primes, you do for ultra primes or other lenses designed for 35mm film cams... Primes are primes and superior optically over zooms. HD zooms are better than standard zooms but will still barrel a lot on f/pulls... If you're shooting straight bluecreen then I don't quite understand your directors requirements as the background will be added in post?!! If you're shooting c/ups of fruit then use a digi-prime of longer length and add nd to stop down as much as you can... also the adaptor loses a couple of stops of light, is prone to artifacts and may well not provide a 'clean enough' image for post manipulation... you could experiment with diopters too...

A decent HD zoom or prime would be optically better than a 35mm cine lens attached to a Pro-35 adaptor since with the adaptor, the lens image is being rephotographed off of a groundglass surface. All you are gaining with the Pro-35 is the depth of field characteristics of 35mm photography, not optical superiority.

Digi-Primes open up to f/1.6 I believe, which is the depth of field equivalent of f/4 in 35mm. So unless you need less depth of field than that, you'd get better results using the HD lenses.

Yes, Zeiss Digi-Primes are better than an ENG zoom in a number of areas, particularly in terms of breathing. There are HD "cine" style zooms though that are quite good, and might be easier to work with than primes.

re hd cine style zooms - I recently used a set of digi-primes and had a Canon HJ21 cinestyle zoom. The zoom was brand new and we had a lot of problems with it's calibration/back focus set-up - the f/puller never really trusted it and it really did breathe a lot... mind if you're not following actors around a frame it may be okay for your purposes... I don't what your budget is but I'd veer towards a set of digi-primes - lovely sharp and consistent lenses, and T1.6 as david mentioned, a good range of lenses and they work nicely with a bit of subtle diffusion...

re hd cine style zooms - I recently used a set of digi-primes and had a Canon HJ21 cinestyle zoom. The zoom was brand new and we had a lot of problems with it's calibration/back focus set-up - the f/puller never really trusted it and it really did breathe a lot... mind if you're not following actors around a frame it may be okay for your purposes... I don't what your budget is but I'd veer towards a set of digi-primes - lovely sharp and consistent lenses, and T1.6 as david mentioned, a good range of lenses and they work nicely with a bit of subtle diffusion...

There are so many HD zooms out there it's hard to lump them all into one category. There are good ones and "not so good" ones, depending on what performance features you need from it. No question, the Digiprimes will look the absolute best, but there are also good zooms that are more than adequate in terms of breathing and overall image quality. Talk to your rental house about your needs; you might get by with a short and a long zoom intead of primes.